Over the past two decades, the emergence of sizeable homeless populations in urban areas throughout the world's leading economies has roused considerable public concern, policy debate, and social science research. Despite evidence that most persons who experience homelessness escape the condition, the process of transitioning out has been largely understudied, in favor of exploring how persons lose their housing and adapt to their predicament. This research proposal aims to fill gaps in existing research by developing explanations of why homelessness is experienced differentially as a single time crisis, episodically, or a chronic condition. The rise of mass homelessness in many major urban areas throughout the world has drawn attention beyond local and national scales towards trends associated with globalization such as economic restructuring, income polarization, immigration, and decreased public spending on social safety net protections. The proposed research will draw on and contribute to the insights of this line of research by examining how processes of globalization are filtered through national and local contexts to shape individual efforts to transition out of homelessness in two "global cities"-Los Angeles and Tokyo. The project will use a combination of qualitative research strategies involving collection and analysis of three data sets in both cities: 1) an individual trajectories data set composed of longitudinal interviews over a period of 10 months with 15 participants in transitional housing programs for the homeless; 2) an institutional data set consisting of field notes from participant observation in program settings and interviews with staff; 3) a data set of publications and statistics on national and local labor and housing markets, demographics of homeless and housed populations, public policy relating to homelessness, and public attitudes towards homelessness. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) will be applied to the "individual trajectories" data set to discern how national, local, and institutional scale structural barriers combine and interact with individual and institutional scale strategies to produce various outcomes of efforts to escape homelessness. Inductive analysis of the "individual trajectories" and "institutional" data sets will be used to elucidate the nature of core components of the transitional process such as the role of relationships between transitional program staff and participants. Lastly, analysis of the secondary research data set will be used to attribute differences revealed in QCA and inductive analyses to the ways in which process associated with globalization are filtered through the national and local contexts of the United States/Los Angeles and Japan/Tokyo. The broader impacts of this research include the following. Research findings will be integrated into instruction of undergraduate students in courses on social stratification, globalization, sociological research methods, and other courses to be taught by the graduate student researcher. The majority of the data will be collected at transitional housing programs serving the homeless, creating a dialogue between researchers, program staff, and clients about how to address homelessness as a social problem. In addition to disseminating results through sociological and multidisciplinary academic journals and conferences, research findings will be presented to local and national policy bodies as well as at public colloquia sponsored by community based organizations concerned with homelessness. Findings will be presented in these outlets in both the U.S. and Japan (in Japanese), allowing for an international, cross-disciplinary, and cross-institutional exchange of ideas about how to aid individuals attempting to escape homelessness.
